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Mary Barton
A Tale of Manchester Life
(1848)
This is Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, a widely acclaimed work based on the actual murder, in 1831, of a progressive mill owner. It follows Mary Barton, daughter of a man implicated in the murder, through her adolescence, when she suffers the advances of the mill owner, and later through love and marriage. Set in Manchester, between 1837-42, it paints a powerful and moving picture of working-class life in Victorian England.
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1. The first half of the novel focuses mainly on the comparison between the rich and poor.
2. A key symbol shown in this ("A Manchester Tea-Party") chapter is the use of five shillings; this amount being the price John Barton receives for pawning most of his possessions, but also the loose change in Henry Carson's pocket.
3. Gaskell details the importance of the mother in a family; as is seen from the visible decline in John Barton's physical and moral well-being after his wife's death.
4. The theme of motherhood is connected to declining masculinity.
5. The second half of the book deals mainly with the murder plot. Here it can be seen that redemption is also a key aspect of the novel.
6. Death plays a significant and unavoidable role in the plot: it has been interpreted both as mere realism and autobiographically as the cathartic relief of grief over her son's premature death. The image of a dying child was also a troupe of Chartist discourse.
7. The primary social theme of the novel, Mary Barton, is the dueling dynamic between the working class and the ruling class.
8. One element of the novel that has been a subject of heavy criticism is the apparent shift in genres between the political focus of the early chapters to the domestic in the later ones.
9. Raymond Williams particularly saw this as a failure by the author: the early chapters, he said, are the 'most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s', but later the novel becomes a 'familiar and orthodox...Victorian novel of sentiment'.
10. Prominent in the novel is Gaskell's attempt to reinforce the realism of her representation through the inclusion of 'working-class discourses', not only through the use of closely imitated colloquialisms and dialect, but also through 'passages from Chartist poems, working class ballads, proverbs, maxims and nursery rhymes, as John Barton's radical discourse, Ben Davenport's deathbed curses, and Job Legh's language of Christian submission.
11. Mrs. Gaskell's most memorable descriptions are of the living conditions of the working class. Marx and Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto that as industry replaces the skilled laborer.
12. Critics of 19th century literature often accused Mrs. Gaskell of being an advocate of the working class and crushed middle class, but she later wrote the novel North and Sound and made reconciliation between these two classes.--Submitted by Anonymous
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Recent Forum Posts on Mary Barton
Did Gaskell and Engels know each other?
I started reading The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels, which was based on his observations in Manchester during the 1840s. Friedrich Engels was the son of a wealthy, German industrialist, who also had business assets in England. Engels wanted to study the working class in Britain because at the time it was the most industrialized country in the world. His introduction reminded me of history lessons from school. It always seemed to be either the Industrial Revolution or the Tudors when I was at school. Anyway, the rate at which industry grew during those years was astounding, the way Engels reported them. I was reminded just how many textiles we made back then. Friedrich Engels wrote that he spent his time in Manchester talking to factory workers rather than hob-nobbing with the quality. Since Manchester was Elizabeth Gaskell's city, and that they both sympathized and wrote about working class people, I wondered whether they ever met or read each others books. Gaskell may not have read Engels' book since it was published in Germany and was not translated into English until decades later.
The murder case
The murder case in Mary Barton reminds me of that in To Kill a Mockingbird, in that it seems to have been processed in a surprisingly slipshod mannner, but it is too long ago to know whether it was realistic or not. In the previous book I read, Bleak House, a contested will had been disputed in court for decades. That case had been modelled on two real cases that had lasted for years and had cost fortunes. In Mary Barton, a murder occurs Thursday one week and is tried on a Tuesday about twelve days later. That seems incredibly quick. There are other aspects about the case that seem odd from this day and age: Mary's aunt Esther searches the scene of the crime and discovers a piece of paper that had been used as wadding. That wadding actually contained some incriminating evidence, so Mary wisely destroys it. However, it seems very odd that the police did not find it. Perhaps police were not very professional in those days. The police did, however, find the murder weapon. A policeman dressed up as a workman and entered the suspect's mother's home. He asked her whether the gun was her son's. Was he allowed to do this? Shouldn't he have applied for a warrant? Wouldn't he have had to identify himself as a policeman. If not, would this evidence be admissible? The murder suspect was walking with another man to Liverpool. This man could have provided him with an alibi. That being so, why did Mary have to hunt him down rather than the police? The man who could have provided the alibi was a sailor, and he had nearly sailed out of Liverpool by the time Mary found him. Supposing he had sailed, what would the court have done? Would they really have hanged the man? Not only is it a very short time from crime to trial, it seems that the case has to be completed in a very short time. Couldn't the suspect's lawyer ask for an adjournment, especially in the event of the suspect's alibi having sailed off? Mary overhears some lawyers speaking about the case on the train. They said that usually a jury would not convict on circumstantial evidence, and that usually the police would have spent more time collecting evidence; however in this case the circumstantial evidence was very strong. In addition, the victim's father was rich and powerful and bringing a lot of pressure to bear on a conviction being obtained quickly. Was the judiciary system really that spineless?
Mary Barton death count
In the BBC adaption of North and South, the script writer gave Mr Nicholas a really stupid line about no parent expecting to outlive their children. Not only in this line a cliché, it would an absurd thing for a Victorian workman to say. They buried their children all the time. The death count in North and South climbed steadily throughout the book, but it is nothing like Mary Barton. I have started this thread in order to keep count. Chapter 3: Mrs Barton, John Barton's wife, dies in childbirth. Chapter 5: Mr Ogden the greengrocer reported having drank himself to death. Chapter 6: Ben Davenport, laid off worker for Mr Carson, dies of typhoid fever. Chapter 7: Jem Wilson's younger twin brothers both die of fever. Chapter 8: George Wilson, Jem's father and John Barton's friend, dies suddenly (heart attack?). Chapter 9: Job Legh recounts how he went to London to care for his daughter and son-in-law, but they had both died when he got there. There are plenty more on death row. Jem's mother Jane Wilson was looking peaky. The elderly Alice Wilson, Jem's aunt has returned to Lancashire to visit relatives she has not seen for forty years. That can't be a good sign. Job Legh is getting on. He is Mary Barton's friend Margaret's grandfather. I reckon he's going to cark it before the end of the book. Margaret is young, but going blind. I rate her chances as 50-50. It was interesting in chap 7, that when one twin is dead and the other is dying, Alice Wilson tells their mother to give her the remaining twin because she was 'wishing' him. The boy was suffering a harder death because his mother was wishing him to stay alive. She hands over the boy who soon dies. So much for no parent expects to outlive their child. In chapter 9, Job Legh was actually trying to take John Barton out of his melancholy frame of mind. John had been part of a trade union deputation that had gone down to London, but the mission had failed.
Mary Barton - an industrial novel
I have started reading Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. It's odd. When I started reading it, it seemed not very different to some present day writers. for example Anne Tyler. Then, as I continued, I thought you would not have a plot turn on a wife dying in childbirth, or a child dying of scarlet fever in a realistic, 21st century book. I think Gaskell points out better than Dickens how proper poor many people really were. The Bartons and Miss Wilson seemed quite middle class to me, but not when you read how much of theit income it took to buy food. In one chapter, a Miss Wilson invited two young girls for tea. The little bit of tea, butter and bread cost her half a morning's wages, and she had difficulty finding enough crockery to serve it on. One thing that is not like a present-day book is the way Gaskell starts commenting on the scenes she has just written. For example, she describes how angry John Barton is with the factory bosses because a child of his died through lack of substanance when he was out of work. Then she seems to anticipate her middle-class readers' objections and write that this is how the working classes felt, whether or not they were justified in feeling it. Then in a following chapter, a girl sings a song about working-class woe set in Lancashire. I've seen songs written out in other books, so that was not so surprising, but then Gaskell starts writing about how you would have had to be there to appreciate it properly, and how the singer was as good as some more famous singer of the time that nobody had ever heard of these days. I gather this book is considered an interesting failure. I have read that it goes wrong in the second half. It is quite good so far.
Help Required on Mary Barton by Gaskell!
I have an exam in a few days:( and don't have sufficient time to read this novel. I have decided to focus on the class division aspect; could someone kindly give me a few pointers on this issue and/or inform me of relevant chapters pertaining to this topic. I would be most grateful if someone could help me out. :)::)
Book used in class
I use this book in my undergraduate course on Marx because it so vividly illustrates the living conditions of the English working class in the 1840s. It appeared the same year (1848) as Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. Although Gaskell's politics are quite different - she believed reconciliation between the classes was possible and desireable whereas Marx did not - her book nevertheless illustrates many of the characterizations of capitalism in such theoretical texts as Marx's Capital in a very human way. The website for that course - http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357k.html - contains some links to other, related, materials, as well as some powerpoint slides for my lecture on the book and its relationship to Marx's critique of capitalism.
Mrs Gaskell
If you are a reasonably committed Marxist or at least Marxist scholar as I was as a grad student, you can only find Mrs G's writing entirely ghastly. Syrupy and simplistic, naiively optimistic, as literature it is gawdblimey awful; as a historical document of Victorian living some 15 years after the major reform act, it is reasonable.
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